Productivity Sauce

The default battery applet in Gnome is fine for basic use, but if you are looking for something more powerful, try the Battery Status applet. Once installed, the applet provides more detailed information about the battery, and you can specify what additional data the applet's icon should display. For example, you can display the estimated remaining time, so you can save yourself a couple of mouse clicks. In addition to that, the Battery Status applet offers other useful features such as the ability to switch between different power modes. By enabling the session actions (Show | Session Actions), you can also use the applet to shut down and restart your machine, and you can put it into the...

digiKam is undoubtedly a powerful application for processing and managing your photos, but there are situations when you need something lighter. For example, I use my netbook when I'm on the move to off load photos from my camera and quickly go through them. For this, I use Geeqie, a lightweight image viewer that offers a slew of nifty features that make it an indispensable tool in my arsenal.
For starters, Geeqie is lightning fast, and its streamlined interface suits small screens perfectly. The application supports RAW files out of the box, courtesy of the UFRaw software. Better yet, Geeqie can batch convert RAW files to the JPEG format, which can come in rather handy if you want to...

One of the major selling points of Eee PC netbooks is their impressive battery life which is achieved by utilizing the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) technology. While it's designed to work under Windows, you can take advantage of this technology if you're running a Linux distro on your Eee PC, courtesy of the Jupiter utility. Although this tool is designed primarily for Eee PC netbooks, it works well on pretty much any notebook. So if you want to squeeze as much battery life from your machine as you can, Jupiter is worth a try.
Jupiter's Web site provides DEB and RPM binary packages, so you can easily install the utility on any Linux distro that uses these package formats. If you are...

You can put Google's command-line tools (GoogleCL) to all kinds of clever uses from publishing blog posts to accessing and editing Google Docs documents using your favorite text editor. The latter can come in handy if you want to quickly modify the existing document, bypassing Google Docs' interface and the browser altogether.To make GoogleCL work its magic, you have to install it on your machine. First off, grab the latest version of Google Data from the project's Web site and install it using the following commands: tar xvfz gdata-x-x-xx.tar.gz
cd gdata-x-x-xx/
sudo python setup.py installDownload then GoogleCL, and install it as follows: tar xvfz googlecl-x-x-xx.tar.gz
cd...

Need to quickly add a title or tags to a few photos? You can use a full-blown photo management application like digiKam for that, but the FotoTagger tool might be a better tool for the job. This lightweight utility allows you to quickly add titles, tags, and descriptions to your photos. Although FotoTagger does only one thing, it does it fast and with a minimum of fuss, which makes it a good alternative to a heavyweight photo application.FotoTagger is written in Python, and to make it work on your machine you have to install the python-qt4 and python-pyexiv2 packages and their dependencies. On Ubuntu, you can do this using the sudo apt-get install python-qt4 python-pyexiv2 command.Grab...

When it comes to system monitoring tools, Conky rules the roost. Using it, you can monitor virtually any aspect of your system, and a wealth of available options provides unlimited tweaking possibilities. But this power comes at a price. All Conky's configuration options are stored in the .conkyrc file and you have to edit it manually using a text editor. If fiddling with configuration files is not your cup of tea, you'll appreciate the ConkyWizard utility which lets you configure Conky's settings using a user-friendly graphical interface.
ConkyWizard is distributed as a ready-to-run binary package, so there is nothing to install -- except the required Qt libraries which you can install...

As you might already know, I'm a huge fan of the Bubba Two Linux-based personal server. This nifty device is the center of my home setup, and it tackles every task I throw at it, from streaming music to backing up files to the cloud. Recently I've been playing with the latest version of Bubba Two which sports two new features: a Wi-Fi interface and a completely revamped front-end software. This may sound like minor improvements, but they do make a huge difference.
Let's start with the front-end. The completely redesigned interface now sports a fresh and streamlined interface which provides instant access to Bubba Two's core applications and services. The built-in applications have been...